TBH I don't understand why we're sending static assets through the whole Rack pipeline in development mode. If we know that static assets are always going to sit in a certain location, why don't we add a WEBRick File handler to point at that directory? Not only could it serve up the files faster, but it wouldn't go through Rack::Lock in dev mode (which means static assets could be served in parallel).

TBH I don't understand why we're sending static assets through the whole Rack pipeline in development mode. If we know that static assets are always going to sit in a certain location, why don't we add a WEBRick File handler to point at that directory? Not only could it serve up the files faster, but it wouldn't go through Rack::Lock in dev mode (which means static assets could be served in parallel).